Wake up Britain or perish a starving shivering death

“For Pete’s sake get a grip. Three days of inclement weather and the country grinds to a halt.” – John A Brown
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Wake up Britain or perish a starving shivering death

By John A Brown
2 March 2018

Although this is nothing compared to what some less fortunate than myself had to and who are still enduring I had to make a 16 mile round trip for milk. Putting this into perspective there is a convenience store just 75 yards from my back door, a supermarket 200 yards from my front door, another 10 supermarkets along with countless convenience stores along the way yet I had to drive out 8 miles for milk and even then I was lucky to get it.

Thankfully the direction in which the snow showers were coming from meant that locally we missed the brunt of it. However, a few miles inland it was a different story. Our First Minister Nicola Sturgeon addressed the Scottish Parliament lambasting lorry drivers for bringing the motorway network to a standstill siting that Police Scotland and the Scottish Transport Minister had warned the public not to travel unless absolutely necessary. The problem is that although they were warned, I bet you the very same folk who issued the warnings and lambasted the hauliers are the very same ones who are now grumbling about having no basic foodstuffs on the table. Bread, milk, fresh fruit, veg, and meat are either in short supply or non existent with fuel supplies dwindling.

For Pete’s sake get a grip. Three days of inclement weather and the country grinds to a halt. Before I was born in 1965 there were two notable winters with severe weather, 1947 and 1962 – 1963. Although the country did eventually succumb to the harsh winter conditions in 1947 and well as the winter of 1962 -63 it has to be noted that they succumbed in weeks not a matter of days.

My own personal view on the matter, and I could be wrong, is that years ago people weren’t as affluent as they are now. Personal transport was either your feet or an awkward bus journey. Food storage wasn’t great as things that required chilling were either placed on a marble slab in the pantry, or in our case, the end bedroom as it was freezing due to having no central heating. Now we drive out to the local supermarket or hypermarket, load up the car, and on returning home we freeze, chill and store whatever we want. Years ago your mother had to traips down to the local high street on a daily basis for provisions.

Years ago most of our local retailers sourced the majority of their products locally all year round or whilst in season depending on the product from for example; farms, dairies, bakeries so forth. Nowadays everything is centralised and sourced out of season from overseas. This in turn exascerbates the situation we find ourselves in today. Although the winters of 1947 and 1962 – 63 saw the country eventually grind to a shivering halt, I believe that had things not been centralised (not forgetting communities having to travel further for employment then). Not as many people would have been on the transport network, neither would there have been as many hauliers out on the road when this weather system barrelled in.

If the climate is bucking the AGW mantra, which I think is indeed spiralling into a extreme cooling trend, governments need to address this forthwith. Although the governments of northern Europe invest heavily on snow and ice clearing infrastructure the UK government are of the opinion that as this only occurs once in a while, so it would not be cost effective to invest. Furthermore, by law European drivers must fit winter tyres but here in the UK we are not even encouraged to do so let alone required by law.

Wake up Britain and address the problem or perish a starving shivering death.

28 thoughts on “Wake up Britain or perish a starving shivering death”

Buy a box of powdered milk too, for the future?
Buy a tin of condensed milk too, for the future?
Buy a couple of tins of meat for the future?
Pick up a couple of pounds each of dried legumes & rice?

Do anything to prepare for the next outage? Or just got your jug of milk and went home to make tea?

It isn’t hard to prepare, but it does require deciding to do things “for the future”…

One dry pound per person per day is what it takes. Get some glass jars and put lentils, rice, sugar, powdered milk, flour, etc. etc. in them. It keeps for a year or two for most things. Many, like sugar, keep forever. I’ve found 10 year old lentils are fine, but 2 year old peas do not soften in cooking enough. Those are the extremes. Everything else is in between.

I now NEVER have emergency outages of the basics. Worst case, I have my tea with tinned condensed milk and have to use bottled olive oil and flour to make biscuits to go with it…

And yes, even SPAM is welcome. Spam, crackers, and tea is what got my Mum through The War… It’s good enough for me too.

Moreover, the chains use “just in time” warehousing and delivery to stores, i.e., they have no real warehouses – they depend on shipments from suppliers to arrive “just in time” for the sales. They have shrunk stores and have, at most, 4 days worth of supplies with normal buying. When people stock up, that goes down to 2 or less.
Does England have a “strategic food supply” like its strategic fuel supply? I think not.

11/03/18
I totally agree with your assessment. I live in Eastern Scotland, and many roads were blocked for 5 days, last week, covered in 7 foot snowdrifts, hundreds of feet wide, around many of the villages. Unfortunately, if I am not mistaken there are already signs that very cold weather will soon return to Scotland, within a week or so. What’s happening to our climate? It is most definitely getting much colder. We have had 37 days of FROST this winter so far in rural Scotland. That has to be a record!

Winter is not finished for the UK and may not be until the mid-April period.
Another beast from the East is due to kick in as from the week end starting 17th March with intense cold. The major Low over the Mid Atlantic is expect to slide South East over to Iberia and Mid France, generating significant moisture waves moving North toward Southern Britain, together with a strong easterly gale. Snow in the UK on or around the Equinox can last till May.
The problem for the UK is the warmish South Westerly prevailing wind which maintains the UK average temperature of 14C, in this situation rare major snow events lasts a few days, with the snow normally wet and heavy which soon melts.
It is only during Low EUV periods between Solar Cycles or during AMP affected cycles like SC20 and SC24 that atmospheric events like the Beast from the East occur and its dry blowy snow, and it is still underway, with Northern England and Scotland intense cold period lasting a further 7 days longer than Southern England’s.
SC25 Sun spot count is expected to Max at 55 full sized wolf spots, one of the lowest energy output cycles since Maunder, with a multi cycle Gleissberg period of around 70 years to follow it.
Cooling is well under way, it isn’t CO2 which controls our climate, but EUV which shapes the atmospheric circulation currents and the weather which carried by them.

Jim Bob,
You seem to be quite a technical expert on climate,so why say we are “in the Arctic” , when we are not.
Secondly ,please use full explanatory terms instead of “SC20” and “SC 24”. You don’t explain your jargon re Solar Cycles , “Gleissberg period” etc to the rest of us “laymen”.

until the late 70s even in aus we used to have bread n milk home delivered by horse n cart in quite a few urban spots, fresh veg in some places also
so oldies and the non drivers didnt have to go fetch
and from early childhood most people were aware to always keep supplies for a min of a week on hand, dry goods even more
so when you cant get TO the shops you can make scones damper or bread if you have some beer handy, as well as few kilos of flour stored, hell now you get dry yeast which makes it a no brainer to make. dried grains n beans n rice should be in every panty and if it isnt then those going without are pretty much asking to go hungry in minor hiccoughs like this scenario.hell UHT milk is cheap and easy to keep a few stashed even in non emergency times.
a huge advantage is if powers out in cold you dont lose all the fridge/freezer contents.
the onus is on YOU the homeowner to damned well BE prepared! if this wakes the sheeple up then its a good thing.

I too have been increasing concerned about how we (in the US) are now almost totally dependent on food coming from overseas… and I live in an agricultural area and rent a little bubba house on a 500 acre farm! The reason this happens here at least is the majority of local farmers follow the advice of the ag-extension people who subsidize farming of particular items… and here it is mostly corn or soy for animals. Well… previously most of what they grew here was cotton (heavily dosed with pesticides, due to the boll weavil problem) or tobacco. There are some places locally where they raise cattle or hogs also.

But generally when you go to the store about 80% of all produce is from overseas. Fortunately, recently the local store dI most often use has developed a new “line” of produce that the advertise was locally grown from farmers. I hope that trend continues… but no guarantee it will because that store may be going out of business soon (according to the local newspaper at least).

If you are wondering… I do garden a bit, but as I am disabled (severe arthritis and back problems) it is getting much more difficult… and in the past few years a lot of my produce has not produced anything – I suspect due to use of Roundup in the fields nearby.

And since I am a lot closer to Florida than California… you would think a lot of the things like oranges and other things that are grown in the US would come from Florida… but if they are not shipped from overseas… it seems like most of the time they come from CA, over 3000 miles away. NOT smart planning!

One other Government initiative that aggrevated the situation was Rail Electrification.
The old Steam & Diesel Engines didn’t suffer with “Frozen Power Rails”, only frozen points which were much easier to fix.

Third rail is a last centry South East, Greater London solution followed by the Westcoast Overhead solution from mid sixties onwards.
Frozen points and leaves on the line have just as much distruption, as does the “Wrong type of snow” coin by the old BR during the Eighties Solar Minimum period, and another beast from the East period.

I 1st read about this in connection to a few reports in alternative media about 5 years ago. Then I was mainly into chemtrails and 911 truth but I’ll try not to digress. I was shocked when Ed Snowdon told us about the NSA, Trump won the election and Alex Jones got censored from Youtube. These people have an uncanny knack of being right in their predictions LOL.
They also heavily criticised the OTS (Order to Self) system and how it may save money today but will create shortages when asked to cope with the unexpected. Within the last year or 2, sure enough I began to see empty shelves and it looked frightening.
The main hiccup was when KFC ran out of chicken. Would you believe it? Here’s 1 of many links:-

Notice how these 2 quickly searched for links report on events during NORMAL conditions. If this sort of thing is happening on good days then what sort of disruption are we likely to see during harder times???

2 inches of snow in the forecast and the UK goes on major alert. In 1947 my mother walked nearly a mile to work with the snow in places almost up to her waist. What a lot of delicate snowflakes we have now!

But for the Gulf stream, the UK is already in the Arctic, its at the same latitude as Labrador, and Northern England at the same Latitude as Polar Bear Provincial Park on the Hudson Bay.https://www.ontarioparks.com/park/polarbear/

During the food (wheat/bread) shortages of World War 2, an alert MD realized that WHEAT was the cause of Celiac disease. Since then, we have learned of over 200 illnesses caused by wheat.

This led others to look at “recent” food stuff eaten by Humans. What did they discover? Cow’s Milk is a very slow acting poison and is not for humans, rather, it is for baby cows, and consumption by humans causes numerous degenerative diseases.

The fact you could not get your milk is/was a good thing. Now, take this wonderful opportunity, offered by the Earth’s Natural Climate, and get off of corn, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, tea, and your milk products.

Jimmy Walker, thanks for mentioning “just in time” inventorying; I was going to.
E.M. Smith, you’re right, lentils keep forever, but peas & pintos last only about a year. I keep brown rice and oatmeal, too. Of course if you live where you can keep chickens & rabbits, you’re in gravy. Rabbit cages don’t take much space. You’d be surprised how much chard and lettuce you can grow in a flower bed.
I dunno about Spam; it’s processed so has nitrates, no? I do tinned tuna & salmon & even cheap mackerel.
I don’t blame what’s happening on govt, but on those who’ve gotten control of it. Decentralized govt w/o the oligarchs running it and bleeding us dry wd be heavenly. And we’d have a Grain Reserve, like the US used to.

Jean S, I live in CA where you’re getting your oranges from, and it’s a wonder to me how they can ruin something so long-lasting as an orange. When I can get them from a neighbor’s backyard, they’re delicious even after 2 weeks storage, but those from the stores are AWFUL.
Recently other fruit that I’ve bought is pithy & rotten inside while looking fine outside– like peaches & plums. Baffling.

Gardening in bins lets you bend far less, and maybe you could rig a plexiglas sheet or something against your neighbor’s prevailing winds.
Regards

Thanks for your suggestions Penelope. I used to live in Alpine CA and there we had there a most wonderful fruit stand that sold organic, ripened on the tree oranges… which were like nothing I’ve ever eaten. I rarely buy the ones from the store, and then mostly because here there is nothing else.

My understanding from my cousin (a cross country truck driver for a bit) is that they pick the fruit unripened and use some kind of chemicals to artificially “ripen” the fruit while it’s in transit… which might have something to do with why it tastes terrible.

The creepiest thing I experienced in recent years is one time I bought a bag of apples and one of them turned entirely BLACK (inside and out) within a few weeks… nothing I have ever heard of. let alone seen.

The biggest problem I have gardening (even in containers) … is I cannot handle heat & humidity for more than a few minutes and have difrficulty keeping things watered and otherwise tended to. Fortunately here we get lots of rain in the summer, which helps.

I still do some limited gardening in larger containers (mostly Earth boxes, which are self-watering)… but in the past few years my crops have been terrible, most likely due to neighboring farmers using Roundup and destroying the soils & maybe pollinators.

This year I am on a strict diet for weight loss, so only growing lettuce and spinach until the heat comes… but I plan in putting tons of flowers that attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and various other good bugs. I figure feeding them has got to be a good thing at least.

Jim Bob is quite right about the Gulf Stream.Its warm waters from the Caribbean keep the whole of Western Europe relatively mild in winter. We are just above 52 degrees North here in Cardigan Island Coastal Farm Park, on the Cardigan Bay coast of West Wales. We used to plant our early potatoes as soon as possible after February 15th in the 1980s. This year would have been bad because it was minus 6C on March 1st and any potato seed in the ground would have frozen. A High Pressure over Scandinavia is bound to bring winds clockwise from Siberia,thereby cancelling out warmer winds from the Atlantic. Of course since Atlantic winds carry moisture, that turns to snow when it meets the cold easterlies.
A high is building over Sweden next week-end, so some areas,especially in eastern UK and on our Welsh hills, can expect snow.
However, Jim Bob is exaggerating when he says the UK is “in the Arctic”.

The Arctic Circle passes just above 65 degrees north .That is north of Iceland and well north of UK. That is “the Arctic”.The Arctic Circle passes through the “Norwegian Sea”. The Arctic Ocean is north of that.
Jim Bob is quite right in saying that the UK is on the same latitude as Labrador, which has severe winters.but the Arctic Circle passes through Baffin Island and the very north of Canada and Alaska.
By the way, New York…….which can get severe winters……is on the same latitude as Madrid , Southern Italy and Greece !

So let’s propose a toast to the GULF STREAM……….EUROPE’S FINEST FRIEND !!!